The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [22]
The minutes of the Secret Service Bureau committee meetings for November 1912 and May 1913 show continued support for Cumming’s expanding work. At the latter meeting a combined estimate was approved of £16,212 for both branches, as was Cumming’s scheme to develop a network of agents in Norway and Denmark reporting on German naval matters, especially ship movements through the entrance to the Baltic Sea. Sir Arthur Nicolson asked that a proposal in November 1912 to station permanent agents ‘in four continental ports’ (at a total annual cost of £1,600) be included on the 1913-14 estimates ‘and he would then consider it favourably’. Six months later, a slightly scaled-down scheme, costing £1,200, was approved.16 Late in 1912 Lord Onslow (who had succeeded Errington as Nicolson’s private secretary in May 1911) allowed £1,000 ‘for miscellaneous payments and contingencies’, which Cumming called ‘my special fund’.
Cumming also secured permission to expand his operations in Belgium, and he proposed that Regnart should be appointed as ‘Branch Agent’ in Brussels. This led to an extraordinary public disagreement between Cumming and Captain Thomas Jackson, who had succeeded Bethell as Director of Naval Intelligence (but with the new title, which prevailed for the next six years, of Director of the Intelligence Division) in January 1912. When Cumming explained to the May 1913 committee meeting that he wanted ‘to employ a certain Marine officer, who possessed special qualifications’, Jackson interjected that ‘he personally did not consider the man whom C wanted was suitable. He did not consider him either hardworking, clever or tactful, nor that he would be loyal to C, but that was C’s affair.’ Cumming persevered, asserting that ‘the officer in question was well fitted’. Henry Wilson supported him. ‘It was’, he said, ‘impossible to get a perfect man for the appointment, but he knew the officer referred to was keen on his work, a good linguist, and an artist in Secret Service.’ Jackson then changed tack and argued ‘that no officer should be selected for this work while still on the active list. In fact he should not even be offered it until he had retired and it should not be possible for him to say that he had left the service [the Royal Navy] in order to take up the job and thus establish a claim for compensation in case of discharge.’ No one disagreed with this, and in the end Cumming got his man.17 Nicolson ‘finally said that if & as soon as Roy [Regnart] retired, I could have him. McJ [Jackson] said we should all regret it, but it was decided that as I had to work with him, I should be allowed to try him.’ Cumming had no illusions that Regnart would make a congenial colleague. When considering him for the Copenhagen job he had reflected in his diary that he was ‘a very difficult man to work with, as he plays an independent game and will not submit to control - I shall find him a constant thorn in my side’. Yet he also believed that he was ‘the best man for the post’, and ‘I would rather risk a certain amount of personal discomfort and worry than have a secondrate man as my Chief Branch Agent’.
The disagreement over Regnart’s appointment illustrates both Cumming’s increasing confidence in his own judgment and a preparedness not to defer automatically to higher authority, as well as a shrewd appreciation of the variable range of personalities he had to deal with in intelligence work. One such was ‘Major H.L.B.’ whom he met in January 1911. He was ‘a curious looking man with a large hawk like nose, brown eyes and brown hair. Medium height - about 5.8 - rather showy dressed, with an enormous pearl pin.